Monthly Archives: March 2014

OK, Music Boss, admit it: you tried pretty hard to get our attention with the 1.8.1.4 update. I mean, Pebble smartwatches, streaming movies, and Chromecast all in the same story? How could we resist?

Music Boss is a robust way to control playback of various media apps via your Pebble or Pebble Steel smartwatch, and it was also one of the very first additions to the official Pebble app store. The tool is light-years ahead of the basic music player built into the Pebble, allowing users to launch and switch Android music apps, adjust volume, and integrate with more esoteric apps like Tasker.

Ready for another Google Now rumor? We’ve already seen evidence of contact-based reminders reliant on your proximity with another person, and “inferred events,” whereby Now would pluck mentions of meetings or other appointments from your conversations to automatically create calendar entries. This time, we have something just as useful – a new bill pay card and interface, evidently headed for Google Now.

Disclaimer: No matter the confidence level, there’s always a chance product updates, features, and some or all details will be changed or cancelled altogether.

Welcome to the latest entry in our Bonus Round series, wherein we tell you all about the new Android games of the day that we couldn’t get to during our regular news rounds. Consider this a quick update for the dedicated gamers who can’t wait for our bi-weekly roundups, and don’t want to wade through a whole day’s worth of news just to get their pixelated fix. Today we’ve got an exhaustively realistic flight sim, a Dance Dance Revolution clone, a colorful slot racing game, and a kid-friendly puzzle game.

Text expansion saves time. It’s really that simple. Rather than typing out a lengthy word over and over, like a regularly visited URL or an embarrassingly long middle name, save it as a text expansion so that pressing a few pre-determined characters will insert that word instead. Google’s keyboard comes with this functionality available out of the box, as do some alternative third-party keyboards, but this requires commitment to one of these options.

Collectable card battle games are incredibly popular on the Play Store and its mobile contemporaries, perhaps only outnumbered by various Bird ripoffs of the Angry and Flappy variety. Now you can get your tedious, IAP-riddled card action on in a Star Wars flavor, because Assault Team is available in the United States (and probably a lot of other places as well). For the one guy who’s been patiently waiting since the Australian test release, this is very exciting news.

You can finally say goodbye to that desktop Music Manager app for Google Play Music. Well, as long as you don’t mind venturing into the Play Music labs. Google has added a new Chrome app toggle in the labs that enables drag-and-drop music uploads and a cool little pop-out player interface.

Just head to the labs page and enable “Google Play Music for Chrome” and save your changes. Chrome will download the extension, and then you can drag any compatible songs files into the Play Music window to upload.

Being a student is expensive. Unless Mom and Dad have this one covered, you have to foot the cost of classes, books, and food with just scholarships and loans to help. The positive side? You can now get a Spotify Premium account for 50% off. That’s right – all you can eat music for $ 4.99. It’s like a meal plan you can actually afford to have.

There are a lot of Reddit clients for Android, and surprisingly, a lot of really solid options. One of them is Reddit Now, and it’s been getting steadily better ever since the initial release. Version 3 is probably the biggest update yet, with a significant improvement to the user interface. You can now move through the major subreddit categories, or your own bookmarked subreddits, by swiping through tabs a la the Play Store.

“Smart contact lens.” Get used to that term, even if it makes you cringe – a new patent from Google indicates that at least someone at Mountain View thinks it’s a potentially viable idea. Patent Bolt reports on a Google application to the USPTO for “multi-sensor contact lenses,” intended primarily as a method for blinking input or input augmentation for wearable devices, or just electronics in general. (Note: this shouldn’t be confused with Google’s other contact lenses, announced in January as a medical diagnostic device for diabetics.)

The basic idea is that a number of sensors embedded into a contact lens could be used to detect blinks with incredible accuracy.